Prompted by efforts to initiate municipal assault weapons bans in Vermont towns, a growing number of residents are organizing to promote competing measures. Today, petitions were posted in five towns requesting affirmation of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The petition specifically states that the Second Amendment is not to be debased as “a mere hunting right,” a direct rejoinder to recent comments by Gov. Shumlin.

Growing numbers of pedophiles and the violently mentally ill are being turned loose on Vermonters, and our government wishes to restrict our peaceable defense. Our state has some of the most “liberal” gun ownership and transfer laws in America, and one of the lowest crime rates. We have one of the highest per capita ratios of pedophiles in the country; we rate second nationally in prescription drug addiction.

We do not wish to be dismissed as fringe, paranoid, militia types. Our message is simple: Let us defend ourselves, including against our government.

(The federal government has subverted foreign democracies; deliberately experimented on thousands of GIs with LSD, nerve agents and other bioweapons, and with nuclear contamination; deliberately allowed black men to suffer from syphilis for experimentation; interred Japanese Americans; endorsed reefer madness — and some Americans want to trust government with complete military superiority over its citizenry?)

This effort is called Preserving Every American’s Constitutional Heritage. Each volunteer covers a town. By tomorrow afternoon, we expect to have petitions in at least 10 towns. By Monday, we expect to be in Connecticut, New Hampshire and elsewhere.

My name is John Klar. I have formed PEACH. I am a Connecticut attorney, farming in Vermont. I am a sixth-generation Vermonter. I represented Coloradan gun rights protester Rick Stanley before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Connecticut, I currently represent (pro bono) the family of Heather Messenger, who was killed by her husband, David, in front of their child, while she was pregnant.

Look at all of Vermont’s most heinous crimes in recent years. Almost all involve mentally ill villains; almost none involve guns; we have had no mass shootings.

Yesterday it was reported that the authorities at Sandy Hook have requested armed security to alleviate anxiety in the children. Millions of us own guns safely and do not wish to be disarmed because of the alienated, self-worshiping nuts encouraged by a societal obsession with television programming so disturbingly focused on serial killers, rapists, cannibalism and people buried alive. The growing numbers of these people are the reason ever more of us are buying guns.

Smarten up, or don’t. But leave us and the Constitution alone. We are PEACH, and we feel the same way as those Sandy Hook kids who do not want to be left unprotected.